A recent editorial described elements of Senate Bill 2559 that is making its way through the Legislature to ensure greater accountability for funds allocated to homeless shelters (“Ensure that shelters fill beds,” Our View, April 6).
I am fully supportive of that objective, but, the general public, including legislators, the media and other governmental offices are sometimes so removed from the actual delivery of services that they fail to set their sights on the right measures of success.
Homeless shelter occupancy has been given so much attention. Yet it is a lousy measure of whether a shelter is achieving success.
As an emergency shelter, the Institute for Human Services (IHS) regularly experiences a vacancy rate of about 20 percent among its 400 beds throughout the men, women and family shelters. This number does not reflect how we are constantly turning over beds as people leave almost every day. Wherever they go, they’ve benefited from a safe place to sleep for the time they have been with us.
The vacancy rate also fails to reflect the new referrals daily from local hospitals, the community, our outreach team, other service providers or people simply walking in.
If we were full, we would need to turn people away. But as a safety net for the community, we are glad that there is always some room for people who genuinely need help.
So what would be good indicators of a well-operated homeless shelter?
First, let’s get some definitions straight.
We have emergency shelters and transitional shelters and both serve important but very different objectives.
The volume of people served in emergency shelters would be a good measure of whether they are serving as a safety net.
The length of stay before guests are transitioned into more stable housing, employment rates at exit and rates of increased income at exit are three solid outcomes that reflect success. These are standard measures emergency shelters already track across our system.
For transitional shelters, the same set of measures could apply except that exits into permanent housing would be the primary housing outcome indicator.
I’ve learned over the years that many factors come into play to enable those outcomes or not.
For example, housing is a particularly challenging outcome if an individual doesn’t have the skills to get a job that pays a living wage; or if our community severely lacks affordable housing inventory.
The state can and should demand performance from nonprofit providers. But perhaps it should better address some of the program policy issues that impact performance.
As a homeless services provider, IHS works within service systems that have unintentionally enabled poverty and disincentivized employment.
As for accountability, we are annually audited by the state Department of Health, the Department of Human Services, the city Department of Community Services and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Developmnt.
We also undergo (and pay for) an annual independent financial audit.
Finally, we are surveyed by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitative Facilities every three years to maintain our accreditation for case management services.
Wouldn’t you agree that we have more than sufficient external oversight of our operations to hold us accountable for the resources awarded to us?
Why aren’t some people coming in to shelter?
The reasons vary greatly.
Half the time, it’s because they have not been encouraged to do so or they have not received the consistent support to let them know they matter.
When it comes to effective intervention with homeless people, I would vote for personalized support in the form of outreach and case manage- ment over partitions any day.
